I initially started by manually copying and pasting red spheres in the fountain, but I quickly realised that this was an inefficient use of my time and that there had to be a more effective way. Following some investigation, I came to the conclusion that I could make use of the particle simulator.
After placing a particle emitter in the scene, I activated the game to see what it would do. The output consisted of small particles, so I altered the shape to make them into spheres and then altered the particle size because they were excessively large.
After observing that the balls were coming into contact with one another, I activated the’self collide’ setting.
From this angle, the balls would fill up the fountain, but a good number of them would bounce off and go in different directions. This was something I did not want because the lifetime of the particles was infinite, and there was no way for me to get rid of them. In an effort to find a solution to this problem, I played around with the settings pertaining to collision strength, friction, and stickiness in search of the optimal combination of these three factors.
As soon as I realised that the water feature in the middle of the fountain was the primary source of my issues, as it was causing the balls to bounce off of it, I made the decision to temporarily remove it from the fountain. to reintroduce once I had completed everything.
After that, I used some keyframes to ensure that the fountain appeared to be full while simultaneously concealing the emission source.
I started off by constructing a couple of Spanish townhouses, one of which featured the traditional window bars, and the other featured some small balconies. I began by extruding what would become the platform, after which I inserted some edge loops so that I could make the balconies.
On the other hand, I was experiencing some difficulties with the extrusions.
I was having trouble inserting edge loops; however, for this particular part, I had to insert each edge loop individually. For other parts, I had no trouble inserting a single edge loop. After doing some research, I discovered that this was occurring because certain edges were not connected to one another.
When it came to one of the components, I was unable to insert an edge loop at all. To work around this issue, I decided to delete the faces of the part that I was unable to insert the edge loop into, fill the hole, then extrude and attempt to insert the edge loop once more. However, I was unable to patch up the gap for some unknown reason.
For one part, I couldn’t insert an edge loop at all. To get around this I decided to delete the faces of the part I couldn’t put the edge loop into, fill the hole, then extrude and try to insert the edge loop again. But for some reason I wasn’t able to fill the hole.
By moving two edges I realised I had accidentally made them overlap with other edges, and therefore couldn’t fill the hole in the traditional way, as I couldn’t use mesh>fill hole, and the bridge feature required equal numbers of boarder edges to be selected.
To overcome this I selected mesh tools > create polygon, held down V, and selected the points I wanted to make in order to form the polygon to fill the hole. Then reversed the face as it came out black.
While making a house, I put a door texture on it but it showed up very zoomed in. To get around this I extracted the door and selected UV > Automatic.
However the texture was still not in the right place, so in the attribute editor and changed the UV coordinates.
I acted similarly for the other UVs in my scene.
For my windows I used the same image but experimented with the translate and coverage settings in order to make it look like different types of windows with different window pane styles are on the buildings. I think I was quite successful with this.
Since the festival I’m basing my animation on is about tomato throwing, I wanted to create tomato splatters around the scene. At first I had the idea of cutting a splatter shape out of a flat plane. But after researching other options I realised I could achieve a more detailed effect if I put a PNG image of a blood splatter onto a plane and then duplicate it and place it around my scene. I wanted each splatter to look a bit different so I rotated and scaled them accordingly.
For the animation, I chose to have Tomatina fall down, exhausted, and traumatised. I feel like this animation is rather fitting, since she has just witnessed ‘La Tomatina’ festival in full force – essentially a
genocide of her people.
While animating I added a skydome light and started doing some test renders with the Arnold renderer since I had used aistandardsurface materials. To my surprise, the tomato splatters would show up with a black background – confusing since I had used a png and supposed the background of the image would appear transparent in the render.
I started researching what could be causing this but ended up more confused than I already was. On Maya help forum chats people recommended using TIF as the render format, however this did not work. I ultimately decided to move on and not waste anymore time trying to fix it – It could have been something I could have come back to if I had the time, but in end I didn’t.
I added a picture of a blue sky to the skydome light, but when rendered a blank image plate would appear.
In my quest to get rid of it I pulled out all the stops; trying to find it in the outliner, changing the light photo, deleting it in the hyper shade editor, only to still have it haunt me, and even grouping all the objects in my scene and exporting them to a different one yet the image plane still plagued my scene. This problem was the most annoying of all, as it was very visible and distracting. In the end the image plane bested me and I admitted defeat.
To add some more brightness, I changed the exposure setting under the camera’s shape node in the Arnold section. I did this rather than add Arnold lights because I wanted the general scene to be brighter, not specific areas.
I checked the Arnold render settings, made sure it was using the right camera (perspective), moved to find the right angle for the scene, then hit render sequence.